NYC Museum Highlight – Alex Katz at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

"Alex Katz at the Met" presents works that span the entire arc of Katz's career and includes drawings, prints and paintings. Presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the works include cutouts, the innovative artistic device that Katz pioneered in the late 1950s, along with a haunting cityscape; portraits of Ada, Katz's wife and long-time muse; and portraits of luminaries from Katz's own social and artistic circles.

The exhibition was mounted to acknowledge and celebrate gifts bestowed to The Met (donated and promised). Katz's artwork were acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Glenn Fuhrman, Leonard A. Lauder and by Katz himself. The show opened on October 9, 2015 and runs through June 26, 2016.

Katz was born in Brooklyn in 1927 and came of age as an artist during the heyday of the New York School. In the late 1950s, he began to develop his mature style, one characterized by elegance, simplicity, and stylized abstraction. Committed to depicting recognizable motifs, Katz minimizes details and shading, choosing instead to summarize his subjects with the help of bold contours, blocks of color, and strategic swipes of the brush.

As much as they represent a specific person or place, Katz's works also depict the act of seeing itself—that is, the peculiar mechanics of viewing, whether from afar or close up, whether on an empty street or across a crowded room. He captures the surprise and suspense, the desire and pleasure, that accompany the experience of spectatorship.